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Free Realms Approaches the Five-Million-Player Mark
A few days ago at Comic-Con, Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley spoke about the success of Free Realms, their free-to-play MMORPG that relies on microtransactions for a business model. The game was released at the end of April, and by mid-June there were upwards of three million registered users. Now that total is approaching five million, with no sign of slowing down. Min Kim, another panelist at the discussion, said, "When people started talking about it back in 2003 or 2004, people said Western games would never want to do this, to play a game for free and then buy items. And now everybody is saying, 'We're going to have microtransactions as part of our business model.'"
"Every time Free Realms crosses another million player milestone the same thing always gets implied.
The totals are always stated to be the unique number of players who have signed up for the game and actually played the game."
Yeah, because these numbers are meaningless. Sign up and play once, then quit? You still count as a "player" until the end of time. Comparing the numbers to anything other then another game with the same model is meaningless.
How many people spent money on it in the last month? That's the number that REALLY matters. You'll notice they don't release that one.
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